Why should you always keep your website up to date?
Even if a website with WordPress is created quickly and is basically secure, there are a few important points to consider. Due to the great popularity and spread of WordPress, they also often get into the target of hackers. Especially if WordPress and the installed plugins and themes are not updated, hackers have an easy game.
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Steps for a clean update
When performing an update, complications can always arise with a WordPress website. A simple click on "Update now" or even the automatic update should be avoided for a professional website.
To avoid a total loss of your website the following steps are necessary:
Create a backup of your website
Before you start updating your WordPress website, you need to backup the current state. Make sure that you really create a complete backup, including all photos, files and the database.
If something goes wrong with your update, you can restore the old status with a few clicks. The backup can also help you later when you edit your site or it gets hacked. Therefore, you should keep the backup for several months.
Create a staging site if needed
A staging site is especially important if you have a site with a lot of visitors or even a short downtime could cause problems.
An exact copy of your site is created and you perform all the following steps on your copy. Here you can test if there are problems and can fix them before. After the update you simply import the copy and your update is finished.
Disable caching
To optimize the speed of WordPress websites, a caching plugin is often used. Here, parts of your website are copied and then loaded for a certain time only from memory. This means that these parts do not have to be recreated again and again.
For updates, however, exactly this behavior can lead to problems. Therefore you should disable caching plugins before updating.
Update theme and plugins
Before you update WordPress itself, it is important to update all plugins and the theme. Here you make sure that with the new version of WordPress no errors appear. Especially with large updates of WordPress it can come to problems here.
If you do not follow this order, some plugins may not work after the update.
Update WordPress
Now everything is done to update WordPress itself.
In case of major updates, you will also be redirected to a page after the update where you will be informed about the changes.
Check website
After the update is completed, you need to check your entire website. Click through your pages and look especially at pages that have a special function (contact form, forum, gallery and the like).
If everything works as usual and your site looks like it always has, you're pretty much done with your update.
Complete update
Now you just need to re-enable your caching plugin. If you have done the previous steps on a staging site, you need to restore this copy now.